Month: May 2016

I’m a big fan of web technology. Scripting in javascript makes me jealous that VR development isn’t quite as easy just yet, with this release that development gap hopefully shrinks just a little bit.

For the third London is Unreal meetup I made a presentation on the topic of plugins and chose to implement a useful plugin live during the presentation. A socket.io client was chosen as the plugin, which was finished with a basic Connect, Bind, Emit functions and an On event all interfaced through an Actor Component. Doing this in a small time frame was a daunting task, but something I was certain was doable. While I didn’t meet my target of 15min for the live implementation, within 25minutes the whole meetup was chatting away from their phones with a UMG chat widget in the game engine.

If you’ve haven’t heard of socket.io before, it is a performant real-time bi-directional communication library. There are two parts, the server written in node.js and the client typically javascript for the web. There are alternative client implementations and I’ve used the C++ client library and ported it to UE4. In sum, it makes networking very easy, real-time and flexible.